whoops

Note:  The bulk of this update was written a few weeks ago, when Hurricane Ida was little more than a twinkle in the Gulf of Mexico's eye. I was going to append something about the storm, my first real experience with temporary displacement, ways to help, and ways to really help, but it started to feel like a separate entry. That will be coming soon. In the meantime, know that we are all fine, and save your prayers and your support for those a little further to the south- they need it a lot more than we do. Now back to our irregularly scheduled program.

You know what's messed up?  When I'm tired, I usually just go to sleep, unless I have something important to do, in which case I power through and then go to sleep.  I imagine this is the case for most adults.  But if you're a baby, you can actually get so tired that it's harder for you to go to sleep.  Can we talk about what a cruel, stupid joke that is?  How can anyone believe in a tidy universe, ordered and deliberated by a being of infinite love and wisdom, when my son can get so tired that he says, "to heck with sleep- which is, objectively, exactly what I need right now- I'm gonna yell at my dad for half an hour!"  Existence is pain.

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

I think I need to clear the air about something I said in my previous entry:

I, uh, didn't mean that long. Last fall, when I wildly underestimated how soon I'd get back into the swing of things, I had been putting out a new blog every week for a few months and generally overworking the part of my brain that reads twitter and gets angry about stuff. This may not seem like a lot, but when you are both a slow writer AND a painstaking self-editor, well, that was swallowing up a lot of my time and brain power.

My plan was to get that last entry out before the election, and then take a little break through the holidays, probably come back in time for another year-in-music retrospective playlist wrap-up like I did for 2018 (here) and 2019 (here). And then, a few days before Christmas, my wife- who was six months pregnant at the time- checked into the walk-in women's clinic with stomach pain. This was actually the day before we were supposed to drive to Tulsa to spend the holiday with my parents, and no offense mom and dad but thank goodness we didn't make the trip, because it turned out the baby we'd been expecting sometime in March was ready to bust out three months early and throw our lives into a blender.

It feels weird to say this, because the kid is healthy, and I've been pretty much fine throughout- apart from that one night, shortly after we got back from the hospital, that started with the Academy Award-winning Disney/Pixar's film Soul and ended with me ugly-crying while trying to do the dishes- but I think I may have experienced a trauma?  The days surrounding his birth were extremely hard in a lot of ways.  The kid lived in the hospital for the first fifty-seven days of his life. I was technically working while my son was in the NICU, since I didn't want to cash in my leave until he came home, but I spent much of that time in a deep, deep fog. Everything seemed very small and distant. I'd sit down to try to write, or practice, or work on a Robtet video, and it was just like, "what's the point?" And when he finally did come home, it was an amazing sense of relief, but that was only the end of the beginning. Now there's this little creature living in my house, soaking up a ton of love and bandwidth. I have been slow to adapt. It has been hard for me to get anything done.  We are starting to figure it out, though, and daycare is right around the corner.

Breathe.
Daycare is right around the corner.
Breathe.
Daycare is right around the corner.
Breathe.
Daycare is okay you get the idea.

Our son really is doing great, by the way. He recently made it onto the bell curve for height & weight of infants his age- his real age, not adjusted for prematurity- so that's really exciting. He's cooing and bubbing and rolling over and experimenting with semi-solid foods. We're getting a lot of help from some very enthusiastic grandparents, and I think I've got about as much of a handle on this thing as one can (in other words: none at all, but baby is still alive). Around the beginning of the year, I had an idea for the Patreon to put on a "Revivalist Baby Olympics," where at first it looks like a competition between the infants that George, Michael, Zack and I all had within the past year or so, but then we zoom out and see Ed's kid (who turns four this year) just dominating at basketball or the 40-yard dash or whatever while the rest of our months-olds are all squirming around on the floor and shitting themselves. WHO SAYS NO?

Hey, remember when this was a band blog? Yeah, me neither. But we got a pretty interesting shout-out in a recent Vice exposé about male prostitutes and the rise of consensual cuckoldry in India:

Rudra Pratap, a 27-year-old gigolo based in Jaipur, India, bears a distinct tattoo across his shoulder blades in a blood-red jagged typeface – two strangers in the bright lights.

“It is from the song ‘Wish I Knew You’ by The Revivalists,” he told VICE. “Something about this particular line fascinated me when the song first came out in 2016. Now, though, this line has weirdly come to define what I do for a living.”

The article even linked to our Spotify page! Anyway, here are the top ten Revivalists lyrics for a cuckolding gigolo to have tattooed across his shoulder blades:

10) "Take good care of me"
9) "That ain't how it's supposed to go"
8) "Meet me on the other side of paradise"
7) "You know I could use a hand"
6) "I ran off with your kin"
5) "I know I'm gonna have to lay down in your thigh"
4) "Welcome to the party, grab everything you can"
3) "Hotel rooms are made for this"
2) "We're all just one big family now"
1) "Now I'm labeled as a whore"

There has been some, uhh, capitol-related discourse this year, which got me thinking about one of the many, many reasons English is a terrible dumpster language: capital/capitol.  "But Rob," you may interject, "isn't it simply a matter of homonyms having different definitions, which is a totally normal and healthy thing for languages to do?" If only. I always assumed "capital," with an "al" at the end, referred to either funding/resources ("we need to raise more capital to get this project off the ground") or as an old-timey exclamation of enthusiastic approval ("capital idea, old chum!"), whereas the "ol" version of the word refers to a seat of governmental power ("Baton Rouge is the capitol of Louisiana').  It turns out it's much stupider than that. The word "capital" has a whole host of definitions, including all three of the above, plus a few more I forgot: you use it when referring to the death penalty (capital punishment), uppercase letters ("always capitalize proper nouns"), and more.  Meanwhile, "capitol" is ONLY used when referring tothe actual building in which the act of centralized governing takes place, eg. "the capitol building of Louisiana is in the state's capital city, Baton Rouge." That's stupid, right? Like, why do we even let "capitol" be a word? This has been the inaugural edition of English is a Terrible Dumpster Language.

Holy crap- we're doing shows again! The handful of concerts we've had so far have been a gasp of air after a year of living underwater. Still, it's hard not to temper my optimism. It feels like this could all go away again at any moment.  That is why I am asking- and believe me when I say I am askingas politely as I possibly can- that you please get the vaccine if you are able to. I know there are a lot of people out there who see it as a matter of personal choice but- sorry- that's just not how this works. I am skirting the boundaries of "we live in a society" territory here, but for real: your actions- your "personal choices-" affect other people. It's not a personal choice when you expose those around you to heightened risk. It's not a personal choice when half of an elementary school classroom catches COVID from their unvaccinated teacher. It's not a personal choice when you check into an emergency room with a preventable illness and clog up a bed that could've gone to a cancer patient. It's not a personal choice when you help prolong the sweeping restrictions you've bemoaned for the past year and a half. It's not a personal choice when your local Children's Hospital is out of beds.

So if you can, and you haven't: please just get the dang vaccine already. If you're asking what's the point of the vaccine if you can still get COVID, then, well, honestly,  you've probably already asked that question a hundred times and then immediately plugged your ears so as not to hear the answer, but let me try again: even though you may still contract the not-so-novel-anymore Coronavirus after being fully vaccinated, the vaccine absolutely reduces your chances of catching it. And, more importantly in the event you are infected, itdrastically lowers your chance of being hospitalized, which in turn reduces avoidable strain on your local hospital and saves you the dystopian humiliation of interfacing with the United States Medical Bankruptcy-Industrial Complex. If you get COVID, the vaccine will be the difference between treating your illness with chicken soup ($0.98) and hospital drugs ($1,600 out-of-pocket, $20k billed to insurance).

So get the vaccine! Please! It's great! It's safer than back-alley horse dewormer! (Words I thought I'd never have to utter.) The Pfizer jab has already been approved by the FDA, and Moderna is hot on its heels. (At least it better be, because I'm #Modernagang) I've had that sweet junk coursing through my veins for months now. It rules. My newly magnetized body has already attracted enough loose change to buy my kid his first bike. And I hardly even notice the gentle urgings of the Gates/Soros Compliance Nanomachines anymore. Why, just the other day, I was about to entertain an untoward thought about an authority figure, but then a slight electroconvulsive tingle in my prefrontal cortex reminded me that Our Masters Are Kind And Good. I've honestly never felt happier. Join us, won't you?

Please. I really want to keep being able to play music in front of people.